Racism is Embedded in America’s DNA
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!
- Langston Hughes
The latest iteration of white supremacist violence that captured the nations attention is the logical conclusion of everything that happened during the Trump presidency. Trump has consistently stoked reactionary violence by vocalizing and affirming people’s worst biases and stereotypes about various groups and racial categories. Everyone who voted for Trump, and especially legislators and powerful actors, are complicit in what happened at the Capitol. They are also complicit in the backlash that will surely continue.
Let’s not forget that Trump kicked off his presidential bid with this statement about Mexicans, “They are not our friend, believe me…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He went on to mock a disabled reporter. And we cannot forget the infamous video where Trump brags about his ability to get away with sexual assault due to his star status, even more loathsome due to the tremendous amounts of sexual assault claims against him.
The list could go on forever but the exercise is futile. The point is that appealing to decency and rationality is not possible in our current political and social climate. Sane people watched any one of these videos and thought, ‘there is no way we will elect this man’. Well, we did. And regardless of what you think about him, he was the 45th President of the United States. We need to seriously think about what that means for us as a country, and where we go from here.
We have a tendency in this country towards willful ignorance and historical amnesia. It seems that white liberals were the group most surprised by the Trump election. Communities of color were much less surprised.
Trump didn’t come out of nowhere — he is a symptom and a creation of our system and history. In the 1968 presidential election, segregationist George Wallace earned 21% of the national vote at the peak of his polling as an independent candidate. In 1991, avowed Klansman and neo-Nazi David Duke won 55% of the white vote in the Louisiana gubernatorial election.
Not surprisingly, the election of a man who refused to condemn white supremacy and stoked racial fears resulted in increased violence. The FBI reported a 20 percent increase in hate crimes during the Trump presidency. Events like the white supremacist attack in Charlottesville, the massacre of 22 people at an El Paso Walmart where the shooter vocalized his intention to kill Hispanics, contributed to the largest increase in hate motivated murders in 28 years.
This hatred and violence has been festering ever since an outright racist made it to the White House. It was endorsed, either actively or passively, by legislators and leaders who did not speak out against this violence because it didn’t affect them, yet. It was mostly being perpetrated against communities of color. The violence was actively supported and egged on until the violence took aim at a white institution, broadcast live across the nation. Communities of color were sacrificial lambs in the political games of our leaders.
Lessons From History
It is interesting how quickly the party of law and order shifted its tone to let’s excuse criminality for the sake of unity. The Republican Party talking points quickly moved from outrage over the insurrection, to let’s move on from this event in order to bring the country together. This is likely because they realized most Trump voters still supported him after the events on January 6th.
Many Republicans are citing the Reconstruction era as a good example of when our country excused criminal and divisive behavior in the interests of unity. At the end of the Civil War, there was a debate about whether to punish Confederate Southerners for their role in the secessionist movement. President Grant was elected in 1868 under the slogan of “let us have peace”.
In an interview with the New Yorker, historian Eric Foner details how President Grant promoted reconciliation rather than prosecuting Southerners for their roles in the Civil War, “three years later he’s sending troops into South Carolina to crush the Ku Klux Klan”. Foner argues the “tragedy of Reconstruction is that the commitment to enforce it waned much too soon”. He continues, “reconciliation is a wonderful idea, but it takes two to tango. And if Southern whites were irreconcilable, that made it very difficult.”
Slavery was abolished, but white supremacy continued to dominate social and political life. Foner details how the overthrow of Reconstruction was accomplished through violence on elected officials,
“There were incidents then where elected, biracial governments were overthrown by mobs, by coup d’états, by various forms of violent terrorism. There was the Colfax Massacre, in 1873, in Louisiana, where armed whites murdered dozens of members of a Black militia and took control of Grant Parish. Or you can go further into the nineteenth century, to the Wilmington riot of 1898, in North Carolina. Again, a democratically elected, biracial local government was ousted by a violent assault by armed whites. They took over the city. It also reminded me of what they call the Battle of Liberty Place, which took place in New Orleans, in 1874, when the White League — they had the courage of their convictions then, they called themselves what they wanted people to know — had an uprising against the biracial government of Louisiana that was eventually put down by federal forces. So it’s not unprecedented that violent racists try to overturn democratic elections.”
If Americans were more interested in the true history of our country, they would have known this violence by Trump supporters was very predictable. Historian James Loewen explains how the policies of Woodrow Wilson emboldened white supremacists across the country during his presidency. Wilson segregated the Navy, used anticommunism as an excuse to surveil black newspapers and organizations, and showed one of the most racist major films in American history at a private showing in the White House. The film, Birth of a Nation (originally named The Clansman), sparked a flame of white supremacy that helped to reestablish the Ku Klux Klan. Loewen writes,
“The racism seeping down from the White House encouraged this Klan, distinguishing it from its Reconstruction predecessor, which President Grant had succeeded in virtually eliminating in one state (South Carolina) and discouraging nationally for a time. The new KKK quickly became a national phenomenon…Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.”
Confronting The Lie
Professor Eddie Glaude, in an interview with MSNBC, explained that when the Tea Party movement first emerged in 2016, many pundits claimed it was a movement about economic populism, not about race. In reality, he explains that many social scientists knew these far right movements were emerging as a result of “anxieties about demographic shifts”. Americans were concerned that the nation “wasn’t quite feeling like a white nation anymore”.
Glaude continued, “this is not just simply economic populism, this is the ugly underbelly of the country…there are communities who have had to bear the brunt of white Americans confronting the danger of their innocence. And it happens every generation. So somehow we have to kind of [ask] ‘Oh my god, is this who we are’?…what we know is this country has been playing politics on this hatred for a long time. It’s easy to place this on Trump’s shoulders”
Glaude acknowledges this racial hatred and animosity is not new — it has always been here. He argues that it’s easy to put all of the blame for this hatred on Trump. He is the most obvious and blatant caricature of this hatred. In the end, Glaude unambiguously concludes, “This is us. And if we’re going to get past this we can’t blame it on him. He’s a manifestation of the ugliness that’s in us”.
As I watched the events of January 6th unfold, I breathed a sigh of relief as newly elected President Biden took the podium. I couldn’t help but cringe as his words unfolded on that dark day in our history. In a predictable but twisted development, Biden repeated one of the very lies that undergirded the events of that day, namely American exceptionalism. Until individuals confront the truthful and sometimes ugly reality of who they are, it is not possible to change. The same is true for nations.
Biden claimed, “Let me be very clear. The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are. The world’s watching. Like so many other Americans, I am genuinely shocked and saddened that our nation, so long, the beacon of light and hope for democracy has come to such a dark moment. As I said, America is about honor, decency, respect, tolerance. That’s who we are. That’s who we’ve always been”.
Professor Glaude takes issue with this sentiment. Glaude proclaims, “America’s not unique in its sins. As a country, we’re not unique in our evils…I think where we may be singular is our refusal to acknowledge them. And the legends and myths that we tell about our inherent goodness, to hide and cover and conceal so that we can maintain a kind of willful ignorance that protects our innocence.”
